By Khalifa Hemed
Published April 21, 2017
A new online catalogue of African movies has been created and is ready for launching.
Africa in Motion (AiM) Film Festival of Scotland, the creator of the initiative aptly titled African Film Database, says the website provides “anyone with an interest in African cinema with the ability to search through the catalogue of more than 1500 films.”
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Described as “one of the most extensive online collections of African films “, Aim says the information in the catalogue has been collected over the past 11 years.
The catalogue, AiM says, “provides user-friendly search functions; searches can be undertaken by title, country, language, director, year, and genre, for example, Nollywood, Bongo films, animations, comedy, or youth films. Where available, film entries include contact information, thus enabling researchers, cinema programmers, festival curators and others to contact filmmakers or distributors to request access to a specific title. “
“Due to the difficulty in finding African films,” says Justine Atkinson, the Producer of AiM, “we decided to collate the information we had and develop our own custom built website to ensure that finding African films is as accessible as possible.”
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Explaining how the initiative came to be, Atkinson says AiM was prompted to develop what she describes as a centralized and searchable public archive of African cinema “by regular requests from academics, industry professionals and curators for details of films and information on films from a specific director, genre or time period.”
Though the Edinburgh-based AiM has done a commendable job in creating the africanfilmdatabase.com/films/website, it nevertheless says it “welcomes further submissions or suggestions to add to the Database”.